Bridging the Sales & Marketing Gap w/ Jod Pod & James O'Donnell #scottsthoughts

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott DeClaire. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the Martek podcast hosted by Benjamin Shapiro. Each week, the Martek podcast tells the stories of world-class marketers who use technology to create lasting success with their businesses and careers. If any of these topics sound interesting to you, I want you to go check out the Martek podcast. How science is changing advertising, how to set up a CRM so you actually use it, private equities take on digital transformation, why big social is focused on newsletters. If these are topics that resonate with you, go listen to the Martek podcast wherever you get your podcasts or you can go to HubSpot.com slash podcast network and listen to it there. Today, you are going to share me on the job pod hosted by James O'Donnell. We're speaking about sales and marketing and bridging the gap between sales and marketing. Again, this is me on the job pod hosted by James O'Donnell. Who is Scott DeClaire? As you always wanted to be an entrepreneur, I'm wondering if you can remember how you got your first customer. Welcome to the job pod, a micro podcast where we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders, authors and coaches. Today, we are lucky to be joined by Scott DeClaire, host of the success story podcast. Scott, great to have you with us today. Thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate it. I'm very excited for this. Awesome. For those of us who don't know who you are, Scott, who is Scott DeClaire? Who is Scott? If you look at my resume, I've worked in sales and marketing for most of my career. I've worked for large Fortune 500 companies. I've worked for much smaller companies. I've done some consulting over my career, worked for my own consulting company. Most recently, I actually, as of just about a month and a half ago, I was working and leading sales and marketing for a startup focused on SaaS solutions for broadcast. We exited and now my nine to five is basically acting as a director in the company Grass Valley for a small little innovation unit, bringing SaaS products to market for broadcast customers. So that's my professional career. And then, of course, the side hustles. The side hustles that have sort of grown into a little bit more than just side hustles. I host my own podcast. So, success story podcast where, again, interviewing and unpacking the playbooks have incredible people. Very much a business focused, but also just trying to find people that have things to teach in terms of professional or personal growth and really dive into their stories and understand their highs, lows, wins, losses. And the reason I started the podcast was to learn from people that I would like to learn from as well. And then I also write a newsletter once a week, speaking again, very similar topics, sales marketing topics, entrepreneurship, startup, all the fun stuff that I like to, that I sort of like tumors myself in. So that's me. That's me as a professional. That's me as a side hustler. And that's me, that's sort of the 360 of what I'm working on right now. Man, you're a busy guy, and I appreciate some of you come to jump on the podcast with us. But I'm fascinated because I saw the work that you're doing with the podcast and the newsletter. But as you say, these are side hustles and these are pretty impressive side hustles. Have you ever gone full-time as an entrepreneur, like between jobs or anything like that at all? Yep. So through my career, I was first sales, sales leadership, and then after sales leadership, sales and marketing leadership for a variety of companies, then left and did full-time consulting. I was a partner with two other individuals. I was working with a lot of startups at the University of Toronto in Canada. Think about, I was working with startups at the Creative Destruction Lab startup incubator similar to like a Canadian Y combinator. So I was doing that full-time for about two years. It was a lot of work. Consulting was a lot of work. Acting as a fractional CXO was a ton of work. And then I decided to go back into working for somebody, but still had a very, like an inclination for building my own things, which is just about the time when I started the podcast, started writing a newsletter, focused on building my own brand. Because the first time into entrepreneurship, it was traditional consulting, outsource consulting work. Now it's building my own brand, building my own name, you know, my own quote unquote sphere of influence. So to speak, just trying to like, you know, get myself out there so that I can do whatever I want with that audience. I can start my own thing. I can of course grow the podcast. I have an awesome group. So the pod, you know, to give you numbers, you said the side hustles is not so much a side hustle. Newsletter has about 30,000 subscribers. Podcasts has about 20,000 downloads per episode now. So it's not just a side hustle, but that's been entirely because I focused on building my own brand while still, you know, doing the things that I like to do, which is build businesses, grow businesses, strategize on how to sell products, market products. So, you know, a lot of the stuff that I do in my side hustle, it's very much in line with what I did in my, in my career and what I'm still doing in my career, which I think is what has allowed me to, to do it effectively. And also in terms of the content that I put out in a newsletter and the conversations I have in the podcast, I think that it allows me to have more intelligent conversations and useful conversations or produce more useful content because I'm living and breathing it every single day. And I know that won't be the case, you know, God willing, the podcast, you know, is something that will completely replace any sort of need for nine to five income, whatever that looks like, but still living it now has allowed me to really kick it off in a good way and to really have really smart conversations with really incredible people about sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, that kind of thing. So that's, yeah. I think that's one of the things about podcasts. And certainly one of the reasons why I've started the job pod is that it kind of increases your lock surface area, doesn't it? Like as you say, you get to meet different new people, your network improves the, the way that other people look at you, you know, changes because you're running something out of your own brand. And that will meant it by having a, you know, already a pretty senior role. You know, it's a great way to look at things. Has you always wanted to be an entrepreneur, like even before you started? Always. Work. Yeah. Always, always, always. I don't come from the family of entrepreneurs. I come from a family of law enforcement, actually. So the career, the career objective was either policing or like to become a lawyer. I started off in tech sales and university made more money than any of my friends could in tech sales and just thought, listen, I want to work in private. And then as I kept, you know, sort of progressing in my career in private, you know, dealing with larger markets, getting more responsibility, I thought, well, what's the next step after working for private? I can either go CXO in a large company or I can try and build my own thing. And I've always really, really enjoyed the idea. Probably, probably, you know, to be quite honest, at first it was a little bit naive. It was, you know, if, if, if somebody else can do it, I can do it. It was a little bit of like young Naviti in me thinking that I want to start building my own thing, which is actually what parlayed into me being in consulting early on and trying to build my own consulting company. But at the same time, it just forced that Naviti that prompted me to go into that and to start doing my own thing. First of all, taught me a whole bunch and obviously, you know, I'm not still working in a consulting capacity. So obviously it wasn't successful by that, by the definition of, you know, build that consulting firm and now you have that and you just take that full time. But it's, it taught me a lot and it allowed me to understand that I still wanted to build my own thing, but to do it in a smart way that was more sustainable for, for myself, for, you know, even like my mental health, for the hours invested, which has led to building the podcast, building my own brand, which is something that I can take with me anywhere for the rest of my life, building, you know, writing a newsletter, building that tribe or that audience as a side hustle, which is now sort of turned into more than a side hustle. But yeah, I've ever since I ever since I started working in CAC, I always knew that I wanted to build something myself. I just didn't always know what it was, but I think that that's a common theme amongst people that are entrepreneurial, they just like building, doesn't matter what, they just try to build something. You're doing it yourself, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a common thing as well for people in sales, actually, to make a move out of being in sales or, you know, anything like when you're dealing with customers directly and providing a service is actually to think about how could I build something like this for myself? Because as you say, you had that naivety where everyone thinks, oh, I could do this better for myself, and it's not always as easy as just standing out and throwing up, throwing up a website. One of the things that I'm trying to encourage people to do on the job pod and people that are listening in is to step out of the comfort zone and kind of make that step. Maybe there aren't in sales that aren't in that kind of customer facing role, but actually to build something and create something for themselves. And often the first obstacle, which I'm sure you'd appreciate, is actually getting your first customer. I'm wondering if you can remember how you got your first customer. Sure. So the first customer that, so it was myself and two other individuals and a consulting firm. And I guess it's a little bit of a cop out because they had a previous relation with one of the investors in creative disruption labs. That counts, like, because relationships don't just happen. You'll still, you know, they don't. So yes, they did have a previous relationship. So that got us our foot in the door. And then we had to prove out that we could do remarkable work and what that looked like was working with the most innovative startups at creative disruption labs and helping them create marketing messaging and pitch videos for investors. And that was that was what we focused on. We focused on drawing out the stories from founders and helping them tell stories that resonated with their potential target audience with potential investors because a lot of these founders were not sales or marketing individuals. They were, they were just pure developer founders or technical founders or even product founders. But it was, it was about, you know, parlaying my experience and, and, you know, everybody in the consulting companies experience in positioning, in branding, in messaging and taking that and applying it to very highly technical products and individuals and helping them tell their and speak their message to the world. So that's that value at the intersection of a technical product and technical founder and our marketing knowledge and our positioning knowledge and our branding knowledge. That's what won us the first customer. And we want, when we won the first customer, it was also the next 30. So it was, you know, do a, do a demo, you know, so how the process worked for a lot of these customers. And we didn't just work with customers out of CDL, at a creative creative destruction labs. But that was a majority of what we did. And it was probably the most fun part of what we did just because they were such interesting companies. We're talking AI, machine learning, blockchain, health tech, space tech, everything you could think of that's innovative. That's what these companies were. And it was basically interview founders, dry out their story, find a way to position it. And we did that once very well. Had a, had some great talent that was working with us that could create a story through video. And that's the first piece that we ever created for a lot of these founders, these pitch videos that they use to go to investors. And after we did one and we did it well, then that's how we got all the other, all the other creative destruction labs. Top 30, I think it was top 30 for not mistaken, innovative startups that went through their program. They all worked with us to create these messaging and branding videos for their, eventually their customers, but first for potential investors. And then that was our top of funnel that we used to eventually do more work with them because we ended, we used that initial, that initial video and that initial sort of marketing piece to parlay into more, more work. It could have, it could have be anything after that point. It could have been implementing a sales strategy, marketing strategy, whatever. But that was a, that was our, you know, our foot in the door. That's awesome. And if you get into a hub like that, as you say, if you win one, you can then very quickly get out and about. And there's so many more hubs now. You have to do good work, but you have to do good work or you don't get it. And that's the thing. So it was, you know, like what closed the first deal, working our ass off for free at the time and doing really good work. That's what got the first deal. That's what, that's the part of it. That's what, you know, took that, that relationship with one of the investors in this hub and then turned it into something that was actually revenue generating. Yeah. Awesome. That's, that's so useful for anybody listening in thinking about how, how to actually make that leap and, and to get over that first hump of that getting your first customer. That's, that's awesome. Thanks. Thanks for that Scott. So your podcast, who, who's, who's the, who's the main person that should be listening into, to that, what's the, the kind of stories and the kind of learnings that your, your ideal listener might, might get out of it. Sure. So the podcast is a mix of how I built this plus Tim Ferris. So I like that is the way that I describe it because it is a business focus and it breaks down the stories of entrepreneurs, but it also breaks down the stories of highly successful individuals. So I have people, you know, I'm going to drop names, Guy Kawasaki, Anthony Scaremochi, um, Grant Cardone, Love and Marhedom. These people are, are all very successful. So we walk through their story and tell the, tell the story of how they got to where they are and the highs and lows and the lessons they've learned along the way. So for a CXO or an entrepreneur or a founder, when they come on, of course, they're going to tell their story and how they got into entrepreneurship dissimilar to like what the questions you just asked me. But there's other people that have perhaps less traditional career path that are just still very successful individuals. There's a lot of things you can learn out from them. So about 20 minutes of the podcast is it breaking down a story and walking through the highs and lows of somebody's career and then about 20 minutes to 30 minutes is speaking through a strategy or a topic that they're really entrenched in right now in their career. And that's, and so if, for example, if it's a founder of a company, we're going to speak about the nuances of the industry or the problem that the company is solving. At a level of detail from a professional in that field that normally wouldn't be able to have access to and we try and have candid conversations about these particular topics. So it's a little bit of a mix of both, right? It's that it's that casual conversation that understanding about that person from a Tim Ferriss perspective, but how I built this is also, you know, how did you build your career or your life? And that's what I, that's what I try and TF ahead of time. So it's not, you know, I'm sure there's other shows that are like it, but I try and get really interesting guests. I try and really ask questions that I don't try and ask scripted questions that just give easy answers. I try and ask questions that I would want to ask the person if I was trying to understand more about what they do. And the, you know, the ideal listener is somebody, I describe it as an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur. Somebody who is trying to build their own thing or somebody who is entrepreneur, somebody within an organization that is just highly motivated to learn how to do things better, learn how to move up, learn how to grow. Maybe they don't want to quit their job, but they want to learn how to start a side hustle and make that successful. Well, the lessons that we teach are still going to, unless they bring out from people are still going to be able to give you that advice or that, you know, that expertise that can help you start something while still working for a company. It's like it's about growth minded. It's for growth minded people. For people that just want to figure out how to do more, it just aren't complacent. That's the ideal listener. And the way that it sounds like you tear it up is that, you know, you get the story so that you get a bit of an introduction to the person, and then you're drilling down on more kind of applicable steps and things that people can actually apply in their internal roles or their ex or their, you know, entrepreneurial endeavors, you know, on the job board, the way it's supposed to be set up is it's an introduction and a breadcrumb for people to find out more about you and then they can fall up with you direct. So I think this sounds like a great, not kind of next step to, for anybody listening to this, is to, you know, check out what Scott's putting out there and some of those interviews sound fantastic. How do you get Gargoyle Sackie? So I'm a sales guy today. I just, I just call the email people. I call the email people and I understand how to get people to open emails. I understand how to get people to read emails and to respond. And that's how I've gotten most of the guests at the beginning now, because it has some traffic, a lot more people reach out. So that's a little bit easier. But at the beginning, it was just learning how to sell and or knowing how to sell rather and selling the show, selling the benefits, selling the reason why somebody like Gargoyle Sackie would want to come on. And you just have to understand what other, what matters to other people and why your podcasts or your show or your whatever could benefit them in any way. And if you can, if you can paint that picture for the guest, then it makes sense for them to come on. And for Gargoyle Sackie in particular, it was because he was launching a podcast at the same time. So he wanted to same, same reason why you see a lot of podcasts host get people that are launching books. He mentioned this before, it's because they need that exposure and you have an audience. So it ends up being a win, win, especially for big notable names. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Awesome. That's fantastic. Now, you've mentioned earlier that some podcasts are easy questions. Are you ready for some quick fly questions of your from me? Let's do it. That might be easy. But that's the style of the show. Like that's what I'm trying to go for. Let's do it. Let's do it. So what's your favorite app or SaaS product that you? Yeah. So I had to put some thought into this one. I liked it. I like this question a lot. And I wanted to go a different direction from probably what a lot of people go. I use an app. And it's not, it's not going to solve, you know, it's not going to solve all your problems. But this is an app for video creation called Vemley. So V-E-M-E.L-Y. It is the most useful app I've ever found for quick video automatic captions and those GaryVee style social clips. And I can create a video on that from, you know, a minute to two minutes segment in five to ten minutes of editing. And the reason why I recommend this app, there's a lot of apps out there that are very useful. But I am a believer that the future is in the future of a company's success lies in their ability to be a media company, to build out content, to create content, to build out followings and audiences. And I also think whether or not a company is doing that or an individual is trying to build their own brand, their own audience, they need the tools to be able to do it quickly. Because a lot of people, a lot of creators, they run into these problems where they don't know how to create stuff quickly, efficiently. If you're starting a side hustle, how do you do that? If you have to spend two hours editing a social clip. So I'm a nerd and I find every piece of tech out there. I'm on product hunt, I'm on app sumo every single day. But this is by far the quickest and most efficient app at creating quick social posts and clips that I've found. So I think that's a very useful tool for anyone who wants to create more content, which in my opinion should be everybody. Man, my day job is interviewing entrepreneurs and turning it into content for them. I use Final Cut Pro and I build a professional editing on the back end. But I'm a big advocate of people doing their own stuff. Like if people can actually do it, they'll pick up their iPhone and record a 30 second clip and then actually throw some subtitles on it and get it branded and get it out there. I'd much prefer people to do that. And if anyone's listening to that, I have not used memory. I've not come across it before. I will take it. I will be checking it out. Don't you worry about that. Scott, that's a great recommendation. Thank you. What's your most recommended book? Sure. So obviously you can see behind me there's a lot of books. The one that I always recommend people read that I really enjoyed is called Play Bigger. It's written by four authors. I can't remember their names to save my life, but it's four authors. They're basically a consulting firm based out of Silicon Valley. And they speak about the strategies that Salesforce, Ikea, Amazon, all these big names that we know use to create industries that didn't exist yet. So I just thought it was an interesting book because a lot of books teach you how to take products to market in existing industries. This one teaches you how to create a new industry that has never existed before and then dominate that industry or category is another way that you'll hear it described. So I thought that was a really fun book and it was a good read and it speaks through. It speaks through both the CEO of Salesforce Mark Benioff, how he basically launched incredible media campaigns to change people's minds from having on-prem servers to creating the concept of the cloud and why people had to move to the cloud. And I just thought that was an incredibly impressive thing and it takes a certain kind of individual leave and think to be able to do that. So I just thought the whole concept and sort of like the inspiration you get from that book is to play bigger, to try and create something that hasn't existed before. And you look at other marketing books like the immutable laws of marketing, excuse me. It always says you don't just want to marginally improve. You want to do different. You want to do something significantly different enough that it has the people notice it. And I feel that that's on a small level, we can do that with any product that we put out into the market, including a podcast or a newsletter, whatever, try and do it a little bit differently. But don't worry about creating something that has never been created before. I think that's the main takeaway from the book that I really enjoyed it. And it's one of the first books I read when I was first getting into entrepreneurship and it really inspired me. Now that's awesome. Again, I've not heard of that particular book, but it's making me think of Blue Ocean Strategy. Yeah, it's exactly it. Yeah. And zero to one by Peter Teal. Yeah. And then also what Naval has been talking about on the internet for the last couple of years about that kind of niche of one and how you got your own unique skill. And I think there's going to be a lot more solar pernose coming through. But dreaming bigger, playing bigger, that sounds like a fantastic book. Oh, definitely check that out. Who's your favorite podcast or YouTuber? So it's it's the guy that I referenced before. So I liked him Ferris a lot. I liked him Ferris because he paved the way for the type of shows that I'm doing now in my opinion. You know, you have your you have your other podcasters. You have John Lee Doomass who has entrepreneur on fire. He does a short show every single day. You have Joe Rogan who does like the you know, the two, three hour marathon podcast, but the topics are all over the place. You even you know, you look at even like like the OG of the of the podcasting world like Howard Stern also like, you know, just casual conversations. But I found that Tim Ferris is probably the first one to do long form business focused conversations really smart conversations with people. And that's what that's what I'm trying to do with mine. So and I try and keep doing the long form content because I feel that if you really build a tribe of people that love you, love your content, the listen. So that's sort of what that's what I try and model mine after. But again, I try and do it with more of a startup or business focus because I know Tim Ferris also has a, you know, wide variety of guests as well. And he goes into, you know, like psychedelics and all this, all this other kind of stuff. He has some crazy, he has some crazy niches that he that he's getting to definitely. But he's good. And he's so good. He's terrifyingly good. And I've got some respect for you to, you know, to kind of model yourself after him. I think one of the things that Tim Tim has done is that he shares an awful lot of his processes, you know, in on his blog. And he basically says, you know, 85% of people are trying to try and copy me and won't get anywhere near, you know, his diligence. Like he's scary how diligent he is with the way he goes. And I respect that. If you can model that, that's incredible. Yeah. Well, I just one thing that he that he, you know, I've read a lot of his content and one thing that he constantly, constantly puts out into the world is that if you, he doesn't monetize most of his content, he doesn't sell courses, he doesn't, he sells, yeah, he sells books. But now his newsletter, his podcast, all the stuff he puts out into the world is free. And it's valuable. It's like it's incredibly valuable. These are conversations with world-renowned leaders, business people. So I subscribe to that. I subscribe to the fact that if you continuously put out great content and you serve the world, you, everything will come back and that will end up, you know, like whatever you want to call it karma or whatever, you serve the world and it will always, it will always benefit you in the long run. And I, that's why, you know, we spoke before about, you know, what's, what's ROI overload now saying, well, it was a brand that I had and right now it's mostly just a newsletter and I was thinking about, you know, starting some sort of educational portal for entrepreneurs and I haven't launched it yet, mostly because I'm not comfortable charging for subpar content. So everything that I'm focused on right now is free, is the podcast, is a newsletter, is the stuff that I throw up on YouTube. And for now I'm happy with that. And for now it's funny, that's what's actually benefiting me the most, the stuff that I put out into the world that's free and that you, you hear that from Tim Ferris, you hear that from Gary Vaynerchuk, a lot speaks about that as well, putting free stuff into the world, just putting everything out into the world. And I think that that's, I think that's what you have to do. I think that you have to be yourself, be authentic, be comfortable in your own skin, and put yourself out into the world, you'll find your tribe and if you can make a living that way, it's a blessing. So that's something that I sort of picked up from him as well. Yeah, Scott, and I think you are living that, you know, from talking to you, the energy that's coming from you and the, you know, the authenticity, looking forward to see how you take that. Yes, if anybody listens to this, hasn't listened to Tim Ferris, go, like, stop listening to this podcast immediately. Go go and see what Tim Ferris is all about and then come back and you'll understand what we're talking about. Who's a up-and-comer? Who's someone that you think we should be keeping an eye on, like Huffington, Bezos or Musk? So I had to, I had to do some research for this question. I was, I wanted to give a good answer and I didn't want to, so my first answer was, well, a lot of the, a lot of the entrepreneurs that I was working with at, at University of Toronto, they're all incredible individuals, but I really wanted to find somebody that is, has really actually achieved the people that I worked with are probably in the process of achieving. So somebody that you should go check out and look into, his name is Austin Russell, he's the founder, he's 25 years old, he's arguably the youngest billionaire in the world. And when I went down this rabbit hole, the work that he's doing is actually quite interesting. He's working on self-driving cars and he's a CEO of a company called Luminar, a couple of data points. He dropped out of college in 2012 after receiving $100,000 from the field fellowship, obviously funded by Peter Thiel, and his company's listed on NASDAQ. And according to Forbes, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 25. So he's just doing incredible stuff and the fact that he's working on such a bleeding edge piece of technology, I think that he has a really interesting future. If you were going to speak about somebody to go follow and follow their career path, he's 25 years old, he's building self-driving cars, youngest, self-made billionaire, that's somebody that you want to just follow and see what they accomplish in their life. That's very impressive. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for doing some extra research on that. I've not come across Austin before, so you've done some research on me, which has educated me, and that sounds incredible. I cannot wait for self-driving cars to become truly ubiquitous around the globe. You have the people that die every year because of car crashes. As soon as we're all self-driving cars, that is just going to absolutely plummet. I wish my wife, who works in insurance, can put a finger out and watch, she's a lawyer, but she can sort those insurance issues out. 25-year-old billionaire, wow, what next? That's fantastic. And where's the best place for people to find you online, Scott? How's the best way to interact with you? Great. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to sort of draft some socials. ScotDeclary.com, successstorypodcast.com, or all the social is at ScotDeclary, and that's done on purpose, so it's super easy. Wonderful. There we have it. ScotDeclary is the founder of ROI Overload and host of the success story podcast, where he interviews sales leaders, business leaders, marketing leaders, startup founders, and entrepreneurs. He found his first customer working in consultancy by delivering some free pitch videos in a startup hub, which then developed into a pipeline of work with those businesses, but he says, you must do really fantastic work to win that kind of business. The app that he recommends that we should be looking at and using is VemliVem.ly, which I'll definitely be checking out. The book that we should be reading, that he would gift, if he had only met me, face the face would be play bigger, not showing the authors, but there's definitely four of them, so it's got to be good if it's been written by committee. He loves watching and listening to Tim Ferris, bit of an idol of a lot of our entrepreneurs and podcasters out there, and we should be keeping an eye on the 25-year-old billionaire Austin Russell, the CEO founder of Luminar. You can follow Scot via checking out his website, that's ScotDeclary.com, that's s-c-o-t-t-d-c-l-a-r-y.com, and he's podcast, he's got the dot com, lucky guys, successstorypodcast.com, that's s-u-c-c-e-d-s-s, that's a triple s in the middle there, t-o-r-y-p-o-d-c-a-s-t.com, ScotD. Thank you ever so much for joining us today on the Jod Pod. My pleasure, thanks for having me. And thank you for joining us today on the Jod Pod for our interview with ScotD. If you enjoyed this interview and want to help the podcast out, please head over to Apple Podcasts, leave a review, and maybe suggest someone that might be a great future guest like ScotD on the show. It helps out the podcast, it helps out our guests, and it just brings a little bit of joy and happiness into our lives. So please be inspired by ScotD, go build something, and inspire the next generation. Thanks for joining us today on the Jod Pod.